The right to breathe. The right to clean water. The right to wholesome food.

Air, water, food – these are the sources of life. Without them, we die. And in most nations – more than 180 nations, in fact – citizens are legally entitled to these essential elements of life.

But not in Canada or the United States. And that's what the GreenRights multi-media project is all about: extending our understanding of environmental rights – green rights – and also showing the dramatic impact of those rights in other countries. Because green rights are among our most powerful tools for protecting and repairing the natural world. And we should have those rights in North America, as most people in the world already do.

Exercising those rights, dedicated citizens and brilliant lawyers are cleaning the beaches of Manila Bay and the air of Amsterdam. They're restoring the Riachuelo River in Buenos Aires, and holding oil companies to account in Ecuador. They're ending logging in old-growth forests in the Philippines. They're suing their own governments for failing to take decisive action on climate change. And in the US and Canada, they're fighting to secure these rights for all of us.

These are great human stories – stories of passion and courage and love, David and Goliath stories, stories of parents and grandparents battling on behalf of generations not yet born.

See the film. Read the book. And be inspired.

Green Rights

The Human Right to a Healthy World

Our award-winning 67-minute film, GreenRights: The Human Right to a Healthy World has been called “the most ambitious and important environmental documentary that has yet been created or proposed.” Released in September, 2016, the film has been shown in universities, at festivals and in communities across Canada and the United States. It can be shown in your community, too, and it's available on DVD or Blu-Ray as well.

Green Rights is about the human right to a healthy environment, and Mother Nature's right to be respected and protected. The film shows the powerful impact of these rights in Ecuador and Argentina, in the Philippines and the Netherlands – and also presents dramatic stories of the fight for environmental rights in the United States and Canada. It interviews the world's greatest experts, and reports on dramas in the courts and on the land, where devoted citizens and courageous lawyers take on national governments and global corporations – and win. And it asks, Why not in Canada? Why not in the US?

Green Rights was produced and directed by master filmmaker Chris Beckett, and written and hosted by noted author Silver Donald Cameron. Cameron and Beckett also produce The Green Interview (www.TheGreenInterview.com), a subscription website that now includes deep, searching interviews with more than 100 green warriors from all over the globe, including 26 interviews with leading figures from the film.

“In a packed audience in Antigonish this movie brought alive the issue of embedding green rights into our national fabric; it signalled the crucial dialogue between Indigenous First Nation and settler communities these rights must be embedded in; it showed how this struggle is being undertaken by countless other contexts around this planet. The movie is important for bringing up all of this, but also for articulating a clear sense of what to act on, and how to get involved in the struggle to ensure our land, our air and our water have rights.”

– Dr. Jonathan Langdon, St Francis Xavier University

“The film Green Rights: The Human Right to a Healthy World, with cogent stories and images, reveals where we and other creatures are now and how we could live more justly and peacefully with all our relations.”

– Dr. Ralph C. Martin, University of Guelph

"Our audience in Erin Ontario was totally inspired by Green Rights. Every Canadian (and American) who cares about their kids and the future should see this film. Silver Donald Cameron shows how enshrining environmental rights to clean air, pure water and healthy food, pushed by some gutsy lawyers and passionate grassroots groups, can indeed change our world for the better."

– Liz Armstrong, Erin Fast Forward Film Festival (Ontario)

"Silver Donald Cameron has done a tremendous job collecting environmental success stories, and presenting them in a way that frames a cause for the audience's collective support and puts a fire in the audience's collective bellies. He grounds hope in true examples of productive change. Every audience member left feeling empowered."

- Andie Britton-Foster, president, University of Victoria Environmental Law Club.

Defenders of the Dawn: Green Rights in the Maritimes is a one-hour television special broadcast on September 5, 2015 on the Atlantic network of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It can be live-streamed here.Defenders of the Dawn has its own trailer, which can be viewed here.

Warrior Lawyers

From Manila to Manhattan, Attorneys for the Earth

In Warrior Lawyers, courageous and dedicated lawyers from 11 countries tell their own stories of trail-blazing confrontations and lawsuits that are transforming nations and re-shaping history – and also their struggles to update the world's legal systems to reflect the green values of the twenty-first century.

Some are pursuing transformative lawsuits in Argentina, the Netherlands, Ecuador and the Philippines, but other lawyers in this book are striving to embed environmental rights in the legal system of the European Union, or creating crowd-funding sites specifically to enable environmental lawsuits, or helping US communities assert their local rights against the might of corporations and senior governments. Still others are fighting coal transport through Australia's Great Barrier Reef, defending environmental activists around the world, and working to establish “ecocide” as a recognized international crime against peace that can be prosecuted at the World Court.

The book also includes conversations with the authors of ground-breaking books like Wild Law, Revolution Justified, Canada's Indigenous Constitution and The Environmental Rights Revolution.

Silver Donald Cameron himself contributes a long, saucy and entertaining introductory essay discussing what he has learned from these lively and provocative conversations – and how these stories can be applied to real-world environmental issues, even in countries where environmental rights are not yet part of the legal structure.

Silver Donald Cameron, the author of 17 previous books, is currently the host and executive producer of the feature documentary Green Rights: The Human Right to a Healthy World, (www.GreenRIghts.com) produced and directed by Chris Beckett. Cameron and Beckett also operate the subscription web site, www.TheGreenInterview.com, where full-length versions of these interviews – and scores of others, in video and audio as well as text – are posted.

Warrior Lawyers is available from Amazon.com and Amazon.ca in both paperback and Kindle formats. It can also be ordered in both paperback and PDF formats from Silver Donald Cameron's website – autographed, if desired, at no extra charge.

In the face of the most significant crises of humankind, a global movement is emerging to transform human consciousness. Silver Donald Cameron shares the provocative stories of frontline Warrior Lawyers around the world. These bold warriors are standing up to redesign legal systems to recognize and value the rights of all life to thrive. A powerful read for anyone who cares about our planet.

- Robin R. Milam, Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature

There really are heroes and heroines. In Warrior Lawyers, Cameron has gathered some of the best together in one place. Moving, terrifying, inspirational — their stories stand as a beacon of hope in our troubled world.

- Maude Barlow, The Council of Canadians

An intriguing, inspiring and optimistic book. All those lawyers, judges, activists — spiritual warriors, as Silver Donald Cameron calls them — fighting to save our environment, not in the trenches, but in courts of law, with the visionary idea of the basic human right to a healthy environment as their weapon. Cameron, a green warrior himself, and a great storyteller, deftly writes of legal battles won and those to come.

- Maggie Siggins, Governor-General’s Award-winning author of Revenge of the Land

A romp with some of the finest legal minds on the planet as they force governments and businesses to honour the environment. You get to the end and realize you have feasted on both revolution and hope.

- Alanna Mitchell, named by the Reuters Foundation as “the world’s best environmental journalist”

Silver Donald Cameron’s film and book are eyeopeners – not only about the ecological gains that environmental rights can facilitate but also and no less importantly about how these rights can serve the interests of the least advantaged. Three cheers for that combination.

– Dr. Robert Gibson, University of Waterloo

I have re-read several passages much like hitting a replay button to watch an incredible scene or big play in a game. It is as if your beautiful collection of heroes were gathered in one group just to tell me there are good things coming, great things possible and to give me inspiration and clues to the secrets of the environmental Scrolls... Thank you for this wonderful gift!

- Stacey Rudderham, environmental activist, Nova Scotia

Cameron, a consummate storyteller, researcher and writer, has met and spoken at length with the 15 heroes described in this book. Their stories, successes, and lessons learned are beacons of hope - marvellous examples of how ordinary people, with vision and commitment, have already made a positive impact on the environments in their countries. From these stories, we can gather hope and courage, and the knowledge that we, too, can change the world.

TheGreenInterview.com is a subscription web site of extended interviews - normally about an hour in length - between Silver Donald Cameron and the thinkers, writers and observers whose ideas and perceptions are leading the way to a new era of sustainability.

Silver Donald Cameron is one of Canada's most versatile and experienced professional authors. His literary work includes plays, films, radio and TV scripts, an extensive body of corporate and governmental writing, hundreds of magazine articles and 17 books, including two novels.